Under the condition of unitization at encoding rather than unitization at retrieval, familiarity could support associative recognition and the relationship between unitization and recollection was moderated by unitization-congruence.

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It is widely accepted that associative recognition can be supported by familiarity through integrating more than two stimuli into a unit, but there are still three unsolved questions: (1) how unitization affects recollection-based associative recognition; (2) whether it is necessary to match the level of unitization (LOU) between original and rearranged pairs, which was term as unitization-congruence (UC); (3) whether unitization can occur at encoding or at retrieval. The purposes of this study are to try to answer these questions. During the encoding phase, the participants were asked to learn compound words and unrelated word pairs, and during the retrieval phase, they needed to distinguish intact pairs from rearranged consistent and rearranged inconsistent pairs with “remember/know” paradigm. The results showed that (1) the role of unitization in recollection was moderated by UC; (2) Under the consistent UC condition, unitization could improve familiarity-based associative recognition without affecting recollection-based associative recognition, while under the inconsistent UC condition, unitization could improve familiarity-based and recollection-based associative recognition simultaneously, these results indicated that it was necessary to match the LOU between original and rearranged pairs; (3) unitization at encoding could support familiarity-based associative recognition, while unitization at retrieval did not. In briefly, unitization at encoding could improve associative recognition and this effect was moderated by UC, while unitization at retrieval did not affect associative recognition.